Facts + Statistics: Pet statistics

 

Pet insurance

The pet insurance industry got its start almost a century ago in Sweden where about half that country’s pets are now insured. In North America, Veterinary Pet Insurance Co., a subsidiary of Nationwide, sold its first pet insurance policy in 1982 to cover the dog playing Lassie on television.

The North American Pet Health Insurance Association (NAPHIA) reported that the pet health insurance sector for the United States posted gross written premiums of $1.56 billion in 2019, up 24.3 percent from 2019 billion in 2018. The market has been rising at an average annual growth rate of almost 23 percent from 2015 to 2019. The total number of pets insured reached 2.52 million at year-end 2019, up by 16.7 percent from 2018. The average annual growth rate of insured pets in the United States is 16 percent, 2015 to 2019.

Dogs represented 83 percent of in-force gross written premium in 2019. According to NAPHIA, there are 20 pet insurance companies in North America.

 

Pet ownership in the United States

Sixty-seven percent of U.S. households, or about 85 million families, own a pet, according to the 2019-2020 National Pet Owners Survey conducted by the American Pet Products Association (APPA). This is up from 56 percent of U.S. households in 1988, the first year the survey was conducted.